Archive2018

Why do my URLs have two dots?

You take a turn, I take a turn At the SMTP level email is very much a simple line-by-line text based protocol. The client sends a command on a single line, the server responds with one or more lines (the last one marked by having a space in the fourth column), and then the client sends another command. The main exception to that is when the client sends the payload of the email. Once the server...

Return Path FBL page down

As of 6pm UTC the fbl.returnpath.com website is down. Return Path are aware of the issue and are working to fix it. I haven’t seen any estimated time to fix.
But, it’s not just you and they are aware.
EDIT: And 30 minutes after I posted this, it’s back. All fixed! Go and submit your FBL changes.

Why aren’t they answering my emails?

Anyone actively handling deliverability issues has had the experience of submitting a ticket or email and receiving no response. Alternatively, we get a boilerplate response that seems to not address the question. It happens to me, it happens to colleagues, it happens to everyone. One of the biggest challenges we face is taking that lack of response and channeling it into action items for our...

Dedicated IPs, pros and cons

There’s a whole belief system built around the idea that the best way to get good deliverability is to have your own dedicated IPs. In fact, senders regularly approach me to ask when is the right time for them to get a dedicated IP. They assume all their deliverability problems will disappear if they get a dedicated IP. Generally they’ve not asked the most important question: should...

Tools aren’t a luxury

I was on the phone with a colleague recently. They were talking about collecting a bit of data over the weekend and mentioned how great it was they had the tools to be able to do this. Coincidentally, another colleague mentioned that when the subscription bombing happened they were able to react quickly because they had a decent tool chain. I’ve also been working with some clients who are...

Captchas

Captchas – those twisty distorted words you have to decipher and type in to access a website – have been around since the 1990s. Their original purpose was to tell the difference between a human user and an automated system, by requiring the user to answer a challenge – one that was supposedly hard for computers to solve, but easy for humans. A few years later they acquired the...

Thinking about filters

Much of the current deliverability advice focuses on a few key ideas: Authenticate your mail with SPF, DKIM and DMARC Use a dedicated IP. Monitor delivery. Clean your data. All of these things are absolutely things you should be doing, but senders can do all these things and still have cruddy delivery. These things are great and can help your mail deliver better. But they’re not enough to...

SaaS systems are spammer targets

There are probably hundreds of thousands of really awesome SaaS products out there. They provide a framework to do all sorts of stuff that used to be really hard to do. Almost all of them include some email component. They dutifully build the email piece into their platform and, because they’re smart, they outsource the actual sending to one of SMTP providers. They’re happy, their...

Transactional mail can be spam

Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out. Enter the...

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